FEWS Net single award IQC to provide Famine Early Warning network services for USAID's Office of Food for Peace

Solicitation number: SOL-OAA-10-000039

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) anticipates award of a five-year single award Indefinite Quantity Contract (IQC) to administer the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) for the Office of Food For Peace (FFP) in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA/FFP) (See attached single award justification). The Source/Origin Code for this activity will be 000 or as designated in future task orders.

The goal of the FEWS NET activity is to help prevent food insecurity and famine. FEWS NET is an integrated set of activities intended to accomplish regular monitoring and assessment of environmental (e.g.drought) and socio-economic hazards (e.g. rising prices), current food security conditions, and a population's current or future vulnerability to food insecurity. This contractor will serve worldwide. It will require an office in the Washington D.C area and numerous field offices worldwide. Current office locations and other information about FEWS Net can be viewed at http://www.fews.net.

USAID anticipates awarding one indefinite quantity contract with a maximum ordering limitation of $200,000,000 over the five (5) year ordering period. Note that this ceiling applies across all task orders and cannot be exceeded in the aggregate. Note that there is no guarantee on the number of task orders that the firm will receive under this IQC, or the amount of money the firm is entitled to beyond the minimum monetary amount stated in the RFP. Task orders may be either fixed price or cost reimbursement. The NAICS Code for this procurement is 541990. The solicitation will be posted on www.fedbizopps.gov not less than fifteen (15) days after this notice issued.

C.2 STATEMENT OF WORK

C.2.1 Core Monitoring and Assessment Activities:

Core activities principally include the early warning, monitoring, assessment, and decision-support tasks that form the basis for FEWS NET’s information and decision-support products. They are generally carried out in all countries and regions that FEWS NET covers with either an office-based capability, or through remote monitoring (see C.2.1.(i) below).

There may be substantial differences in the way such activities are carried out between office-based and remote forms of coverage, and in the types of products and deliverables that are expected in either case. A key task for the contractor will be to define an efficient plan for, and then effectively coordinate the use of resources to accomplish core activities in all office-based and remotely-covered countries and regions.

Centrally-compile, quality-check, and ensure efficient access to the entire body of baseline information and datasets to make them available for thematic mapping and overlay within geographic information systems (GIS).

(b) Monitor and assess hazards, food security, and vulnerability.

The Contractor shall monitor and regularly identify the food security impacts of natural hazards[1] and socio-economic factors and conditions[2] on food security conditions in all coverage countries/regions, and deliver early warnings of the timing, type, and potential dimension of imminent or emerging threats to food security. In this work, the Contractor shall maintain a geographic orientation to FEWS NET food security data and information that facilitates systematic data archiving, overlay analyses, data sharing, and presentation to decision-makers.

Once a hazard actually occurs, the contractor shall regularly assess and predict the impact such events are likely to have on household food-related livelihood conditions, coping strategies, nutritional conditions, and on the performance of food market and trade systems.

(c) Monthly assessments:

In all FEWS NET-monitored countries, the Contractor shall manage a regular collection of key data required to regularly monitor food security conditions. Successful completion of this activity shall be indicated by an expanding baseline of data relative to each livelihood group’s food security processes of concern.

Note that FEWS NET Implementing Team members NOAA, NASA, USDA and USGS will be collaborating with the Contractor in this task by regularly providing information on the weather and crop condition and production information, which will comprise important inputs for identifying potential anomalies.

It is expected that the Contractor will not always be able to collect all the data, alone, for successful remote monitoring in any country, much less across all remotely-monitored countries. The Contractor shall have to be inventive, innovative, and skillful in developing, and maintaining, in-country partnerships that will assist in gathering and delivering the required monitoring data on a regular basis, and to sustain it over time. The Contractor may sometimes need to set-up other arrangements for data delivery that go beyond partnership (e.g. remunerated part-time work). In these cases, prior dialogue with USAID is required in order to define an acceptable precedent and assure funding sufficient to accomplish that delivery.

(d) Monthly early warning reporting:

As requested in task orders, a monthly report[3] that is based upon the tasks described above, is required for each and all FEWS office-covered and remotely-monitored countries. It should succinctly identify the existence and type of threats to food availability, access and utilization conditions (anomaly or no anomaly, causality, implications for response), in specific livelihood zones of each country covered. Where approved by USAID, this function shall be undertaken in conjunction with selected partners.

For office-based coverage, these reports will be of generally the same length and format found currently on www.fews.net, for each country. For remotely-monitored countries, the name, format and exact content of such monthly early warning reports will be formalized in the first 3 months of operation of the Contract. Successful delivery of this element shall be indicated by the regular production of monthly early warning reports.

The level-of-detail, content, and format of these reports will sometimes vary, according to:

conditions of food security and/or hazards that prevail, and

additional information needs that may be communicated by USAID.

Additional information or products that might be required include, but are not limited to, special alerts, briefings, or reports on specific food security conditions in FEWS NET-covered countries. The Contractor shall also, when required by USAID, participate in national, regional, and international food aid and food security needs assessment processes.

In all of the above cases, the Contractor shall complete related specialized tasks and provide unique products (e.g. graphs, maps, short analyses of the situation), as identified by USAID.

(e) Anomaly Follow-Up Strategy and Capability:

In any country of FEWS NET coverage, in cases where a significant complex of identified anomalies may indicate an incipient food crisis is emerging, the Contractor shall be expected to consider constituting and sending a “quick-strike” analytic team to the country of concern. The object of the team’s effort shall be to undertake further assessments that will permit a confirmation or denial of the likely significance of the identified anomaly(ies).

The team shall collect and analyze this information and data under relatively severe time constraints, and shall be expected to quickly (to be specified by USAID on a case-by-case basis) provide a report with its conclusions. Such teams shall be sent upon the agreement and request of USAID and may occur in both FEWS NET office-presence and remotely-covered countries.

(f) Decision support, linking assessments with response:

The Contractor’s Washington-based office shall publish and disseminate all FEWS NET information products, and insert them into appropriate decision-making processes. This requires a report production process that supports, sustains, and quality-controls field office and remote monitoring report generation. It also needs to integrate informational inputs from FEWS NET Implementing Team partners, and reflexively inform field office, remote, and Washington analysts of key FFP and USAID information needs.

The contractor shall be capable of providing a number of publishing avenues (e.g. web-sites, hand-outs, targeted deliveries), and shall maintain a tangible record of people and organizations served by FEWS NET information products.

As requested in task orders, the Contractor shall provide written reports and conduct briefings on current and predicted food security conditions, when requested by USAID.

(g) Website:

All FEWS NET products that are not specifically designated for “limited distribution” shall be published on the FEWS NET web-site. The Contractor shall operate, maintain, regularly update, and periodically revise the structure and functionality of the FEWS NET web-site (www.fews.net). The large volume of existing reporting and archived products of FEWS NET that is delivered through this site, in addition to a regular monthly flow of new products, requires a broad and expert set of web-site management capabilities. Upon commencement of IDIQ and Task Order activities described here, the Contractor shall be prepared to take-over and fully operate the website, with less than 10% downtime in the first month of activity.

(h) Fundamental requirements for all FEWS NET activities:

Scale of severity of food security outcomes

The Contractor shall ensure that all FEWS NET assessments of food security and/or vulnerability use the same scale of severity, in order to maintain an inter-country and inter-continental comparability of results. Until decided otherwise by USAID, the Contractor shall promote and use the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) (see www.ipcinfo.org, and www.fews.net for FEWS NET variations on the IPC) scale of severity in all of its assessments, regardless of location. Contractor shall be responsible for working with various IPC working groups and partners to help others to understand the value of a shared language food insecurity severity, and how it may be used in food security decision-making processes.

Household livelihoods analytic framework for food security analysis:

In each country or region of FEWS NET coverage, the Contractor shall create (if there is no existing), consolidate, refine, document and extend the use of a household livelihoods analytic framework for food security analysis (see www.fews.net for a description). The FEWS NET household livelihoods analytic framework sub-divides a country into areas of general homogeneity where food and income production, expenditure and consumption, hazard exposure and coping patterns are relatively the same.

The Contractor shall utilize the existing FEWS NET analytic framework and its phased approach to building, improving, and expanding the key analytical structures of this framework for analysis, until an alternate framework is authorized by USAID. Currently, three different levels of functionality have been identified in the FEWS NET framework. They include:

Zoning: In this initial stage, the country is sub-divided into generally homogenous zones of similar food security livelihood strategies, opportunities, and constraints. A “zoning” is usually accomplished in a few weeks, and is carried out by a FEWS NET livelihoods expert, or experts, using interviews and surveys of key-informants and local populations. Often, staff from partner organizations, who may at the same time be receiving hands-on training from the same FEWS NET expert(s), are used to carry out some interviews and surveys. Livelihood zone maps are produced at the conclusion of this phase.

Profiling: In ”profiling”, a variety of data and information is gathered and used to validate and quantify food security characteristics of the zone that have been identified in the surveys and interviews. This sometimes leads to substantial modifications of initial zoning decisions since it provides a more concrete definition of the characteristics of food-related strategies and behaviors in the zones. The profiling information provides an initial basis for identifying indicators to be used for monitoring and assessing food security and vulnerability conditions in the zones. Livelihood zone profile reports are produced at the end of this phase of work.

Scenario Modeling: This third phase of development of a livelihood framework for food security analysis requires a broad and current quantitative baseline of information on specifically identified indicators of livelihood and food security conditions. Using this information, FEWS NET will develop crisis scenarios (e.g. what if there were a severe drought, steeply rising food prices, or a closure of the border?) in order to model impacts and identify appropriate strategies for humanitarian response. A scenario-modeling stage requires regular updating of the datasets and information that have been gathered in it.

The Contractor shall initiate collaboration with partners to complete zoning and profiling for any FEWS NET-covered countries where such does not exist. Most FEWS NET field office presence countries are already zoned to a “profiling” level. Malawi, Ethiopia, parts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and several other food-insecure countries in Africa have been brought to a “scenario modeling” phase. As requested in task orders, at least annually, the Contractor shall assess the need for updates and enhancements in existing livelihood zones in FEWS NET monitored countries, and submit to USAID a plan and budget for the work involved.

The Contractor shall also conduct zoning and profiling activities in countries where remote monitoring activities are initiated. These should be cost-efficiently implemented, and should effectively integrate the weather and agricultural conditions, market and trade data, and livelihood and nutritional information collected by FEWS NET and partners in a remote monitoring country.

Market and trade information for food security monitoring and assessment

In most FEWS NET work, household-level dynamics are the unit of its normal food security monitoring and assessment. FEWS NET market and trade activities are different, monitoring the performance of key components of food marketing and trade systems, in order to understand the degree to which markets and trade are operating in accordance with expected patterns, and if not, to provide an explanation of the reason(s) why.

To do this, FEWS NET must understand the structure (e.g. who markets or trades food, what are their characteristics, what structures do they operate through) and the conduct (e.g. what are the normal social, commercial, geographic, etc., patterns of their activity) of markets and trade in a specific area or zone. This may require information about retailers, wholesalers, transporters, importers and exporters, the market policy environment, infrastructure, financial markets, and a variety of other market and trade characteristics.

Among other potential uses, this perspective provides a basis upon which decisions can be made about whether external food or non-food interventions are appropriate responses to food insecurity in a specific food crisis. But this information should also identify the underlying roles that markets and trade are playing in a zone’s household food security.

Note that to an increasing degree, many FEWS NET-covered food insecure countries are relying upon markets and food trade in areas of the world that are not covered by FEWS NET office or remote monitoring coverage (e.g. Europe, China, Australia, Argentina). In addition to other features of a Contractor’s plan for understanding the structure, conduct and performance of a specific livelihood zone’s markets and trade, part of the plan must clarify a vision for how FEWS NET can monitor market and trade information coming from a variety of non-FEWS-monitored markets.

(i) Specific characteristics and requirements of Remote Monitoring-based early warning

Objective of remote monitoring-based early warning:

The purpose of this activity is to be able to identify and predict potentially large and significant changes in key, pre-identified food security conditions in a number of USAID-specified priority countries. This activity differs from FEWS NET’s office presence-based early warning activities, which have more extensive objectives of identifying, understanding the causes of, predicting future outcomes for, and suggesting appropriate responses to, food insecurity in approximately 20 countries.

Nevertheless, remote monitoring-based early warning will be implemented in both remotely monitored countries, and in those countries of existing FEWS NET office presence-based coverage.

The objective of identifying and predicting potentially “large and significant” changes in important food security conditions may be more easily accomplished in countries that currently have a FEWS NET office presence. Nevertheless, some of the countries with office presence may not currently have available all of the elements that are required to accomplish this remote monitoring early warning task. The Contractor shall build and strengthen those elements in all countries of office-presence coverage.

Anticipated remote monitoring inputs:

The largest inputs to the remote monitoring activity will be comprised of labor and travel costs. Labor may include: staff who initiate and regularly follow-up the remote coverage of any country, other local personnel who may be engaged on some basis to provide remote monitoring coverage services to FEWS NET, “quick strike” teams that may periodically be sent to assess the potential significance of anomalies in a FEWS NET-covered country, and the level-of-effort required to convert remote monitoring information into reports and other information products.

Required remote monitoring outputs:

Remote monitoring activities shall result in the following deliverables for each remotely-monitored country:

Analyze any significant anomalies to identify if any further analyses or response actions are required.

Refining an analytic framework for remote monitoring:

The Contractor shall be responsible for gathering the data and information necessary in each of these four technical areas (see immediately above in C.2.1.(i)) to monitor and identify anomalous food availability and food access conditions. Much of the data that are required to do this are already available in countries of existing FEWS NET coverage. In other countries, a large amount of data and information may already be available in the hands of (potential) FEWS NET partners.

For many of these new countries, an acceptable initial analytic framework might be developed using only a desktop study and other resources that are already available to members of the FEWS NET Implementing Team. Elsewhere, data and information available from all sources may be insufficient, and multiple FEWS NET efforts in the country may be required to gather the minimum understanding necessary.

Managing established remote monitoring:

FEWS NET analytic frameworks and monthly remote monitoring activities have already been set up and are functioning in 9 countries at the start of this contract. The Contractor shall continue to implement remote monitoring for these countries:

Burundi

El Salvador

Honduras

Liberia

Nicaragua

Rwanda (is transitioning to office-based coverage)

Senegal

Tajikistan

Yemen

New Remote Monitoring work:

The Contractor shall build the analytic frameworks for, and perform regular remote monitoring in additional countries, as designated by USAID. USAID estimates that remote monitoring may be required in up to a total of approximately fifty (50) countries during the period of this contract.

Nine (9) of these are already being remotely monitored. Approximately twenty (20) of them already have a FEWS NET field office, but contractor will need to bring them into “compliance” with remote monitoring requirements. Contractor will institute remote coverage of another 10 countries in the first 2 years of this contract, upon specification of the targeted countries, and approval by USAID.

Current country priorities for FEWS NET remote monitoring:

Given the volatile nature of food insecurity in the world, and changing USAID needs for food security information, remote monitoring priorities will evolve during the contract period of performance. The COTR will direct the contractor where to implement remote monitoring. The table below reflects current priorities, which may change. The current highest priorities for remote coverage are found in the left-most columns. Within each column, no country has a higher priority over any others in that column.

C.2.2 Other Activities

(a) Collaboration with FEWS NET “Partners”:

The Contractor shall manage three important “partner” relationships that are critical to effectively implementing the SOW: 1) the FEWS NET Implementing Team; 2) FEWS NET’s international food security information system partners (e.g. WFP, FAO); and 3) national and regional food security information system (FSIS) organizations.

FEWS NET Implementing Team:

See Section C.1.3. The Contractor shall collaborate with Implementing Team partners as necessary to produce FEWS NET deliverables.

FEWS NET international operational partners:

A second category of partners includes a large number of “international” organizations (WFP, FAO, Oxfam, IPC, EC, etc.) that the contractor shall engage for the purpose of sharing and optimizing the food security and early warning resources of each, without any intention in either party to build operational or technical capacities.

FEWS NET national and regional food security information system partners:

The third category of partners are national and regional food security information systems. USAID’s objective is to jointly gather and share critical data and information with them, and disseminate it into selected decision-making processes, while at the same time seeking to identify and implement capacity-building initiatives aimed at increasing the partner’s capabilities.

In the past, FEWS NET has had much more success and impact in the training of individual staff members, than in building the capabilities of food security information system institutions to be sustainably capable of efficiently and effectively playing the role they occupy in food security. In part, this lack of success in institution-building may be due to the poor planning and execution of such efforts, and unrealistic expectations about the inherent complexities of building sustainable institutions.

But experience also shows that it is very often due to a lack of commitment by the national and regional governments that are supposed to be served by such systems. Both problems must be resolved if such food security information systems are to eventually play their essential roles in helping to attain food security for all.

While the work under this IDIQ is primarily oriented at producing good food security and early warning information, creating and strengthening sustainable and effective national and regional food security information system capabilities and institutions is also a key FEWS NET goal of this activity. Its primary objectives are to:

prioritize the investment of FEWS NET time and resources to build capacities where there is clear evidence of real national or regional engagement of resources for building and sustaining their own food security information systems;

assist in linking FEWS NET’s national and regional institutional partners to additional resources that may be available for national and regional institution-building efforts; and,

identify, test, and make available to national and regional institutional partners, already-available and low-cost global data collection and analysis tools and methods, and communication and networking technologies that will diminish the costs, enhance the effectiveness, and increase the potential sustainability of those food security monitoring and assessment systems.

As requested in task orders, and starting no later than the second year of this contract, the Contractor shall annually identify at least two specific national or regional food security information system partner institutions where the Contractor proposes to implement specifically identified institution-building efforts.

For such USAID-agreed targets, Contractor shall then propose to USAID a time-delimited plan for specific FEWS NET support and training activities to be provided to that partner. Such plans may include not only Contractor resources, but may also identify Contractor initiatives that will advocate for the engagement of other partners in such institution-building efforts. The Contractor shall implement the approved activities and annually evaluate and report on achievements utilizing pre-specified benchmarks for progress.

(b) FEWS NET Nutrition-Related Activities

It has become increasingly apparent to USAID that nutritional information is a part of early warning for food security analytic frameworks that has not been sufficiently developed for operational use in identifying future food security crises. Without its consideration, early warning, and assessments of food security and vulnerability conditions may miss important diagnostic or even predictive features of current or impending “food” or humanitarian crises.

This is true even if an absence of food has not been the major direct cause of the emergency; perhaps poor water quality or malaria, for example, is also a key feature of the nutritional side of the crisis. The Contractor shall work with the COTR and other FEWS Net partners to define an approach for FEWS NET’s use of nutritional information and data for early warning uses, and incorporate approved approaches into FEWS Net’s analytic framework and assessments.

(c) Maintain staff skills:

As requested in task orders, the Contractor shall provide at least one staff training and work planning opportunity of at least 5 days duration, each year, for every professional FEWS NET staff member. These workshops shall generally have a multiple set of goals (up-dating FEWS NET field staff technical skills, defining workplans, ensuring a fundamental similarity in the approach to assessment of food security and vulnerability in all FEWS NET tasks and products).

The workshops may include FEWS NET Implementing Team members and other partner personnel if such attendance will help achieve FEWS NET objectives.

(d) Population Explorer web-site:

The FEWS NET Population Explorer tool and web-site, www.populationexplorer.com provides demographic information for use in food security monitoring and assessment. This tool and web-site were developed with USAID funding by third-party Contractor Kimetrica International in 2008 and 2009.

The FEWS NET IDIQ Contractor shall be provided full access to this tool and shall take over responsibility from Kimetrica for integrating this web-site and its functionality into the FEWS NET web-site. To fulfill this requirement, the FEWSNET Contractor will develop and implement a transition plan in coordination with USAID and Kimetrica International (www.kimetrica.org)

(e) Implement Surge Activities:

As requested in task orders, the Contractor shall periodically be required to implement quick deployments of additional resources (more personnel, additional FEWS NET coverage services, or products) to either increase coverage in any country of current coverage or to expand FEWS NET field activities temporarily into other countries of the world, at the request of USAID.

A separate task order is planned for these surge activities which will generally be characterized by a quick start-up and often emergency-driven response to fulfilling USAID information needs.

(f) Bureau or USAID Mission-funded Task Orders:

USAID Missions and/or Bureaus may seek to implement additional early warning-related activities under this Contract. Any activity that will be funded under the Contract and carried out by FEWS NET Contractor staff, must relate in a clear way to the general domains of early warning, food security, vulnerability, or famine. The Contractor shall be prepared to respond to requests for proposals for, and then implement the following types of activities in Mission issued and funded task orders:

in countries of FEWS NET field office presence, an activity that is consistent with the general requirements of this Contract, and for which a Mission or Bureau wishes a more engaged participation or more intense geographic or thematic coverage. In this case, the country Mission, or Bureau, will provide its own additional funding; and

an activity that is consistent with the general requirement of this Contract, for countries not currently covered by FEWS NET office-presence or remote monitoring, from any of a number of funding sources.

All reporting and financial and management reporting requirements of this IDIQ apply to these orders. The Contractor shall not undertake or perform any additional services under this Contract without a fully executed Task Order.

(g) Gender and Environmental Considerations:

In some of the monitoring and assessment activities described in this SOW, gender will have direct relevance to food insecurity analysis and decision support activities. The Contractor shall consider and provide gender disaggregated data and analysis when gender differences are known and or identified by USAID.

(h) Environmental Considerations:

The nature of this activity is such that it has no direct environmental impact, and has therefore been categorically excluded by USAID from the requirement to undertake an environmental impact assessment.

(i) Contract Deliverables:

(j) IDIQ Point of Contact:

The contractor shall provide a primary management point of contact to support this IDIQ. The IDIQ Manager should be the individual bearing primary responsibility for procurement, personnel, reporting, and other management related requirements of the contract.

The IDIQ Manager should have at least an undergraduate degree, and at least ten years of experience working on, or managing, a large activity with multiple-overseas offices preferably in the area of development or food security.

-END OF SECTION C-

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